"Yyyyyes but - how fast is the population growing -"

" - I think I read an estimate of the population twenty winters ago, somewhere." He goes looking for it. "Ah hah, yes I did. Twenty-two winters ago someone estimated there were between seven and ten billion of us."

"Okay, so - something close to doubling every twenty sidereal years. Which would seem very modest from the faery perspective but - I don't think it can keep going, not and have things turn out how they do when I'm from. I'm not even sure it can go on another twenty sidereal years."

" - huh, why's that?"

"Uh, in principle, a whole heck of a lot of faeries would fit on the planet just fine, maybe as many as there's enough dew for but it's possible there are bugs or something that rely on dew so maybe not that many. You get real little, you don't need to eat anything else. But you don't - live in the way that would let you grow that far. You hold territory and you have to defend it and its contents. You like food and you can get it, even out of human-cultivated places if you want - right? It's only artificial things you can't interact with, you can walk right into a field and take all the non-artificial growing things you want. You have to go about it in a weird way to hunt but it's not impossible. And faeries might eat a million times less than humans, but everything you do, you do about a thousand times faster. Uh, imagine being a human walking around in the Misty Isles, after every place that isn't trafficked daily by humans is a faery court. This human sees - no wild berries, no edible mushrooms, no birds' eggs, no flowers, no honey in the beehives. Right? You don't know when you see a human coming toward a flower whether they're going to pick it or just sniff it. You have to get it out of the way to be safe if it might be the first thing. But if every wild square foot of the island belongs to a court, and the humans start, say, trying to forage a little more because somebody - it wouldn't take many faeries - if somebody went after their fruits and vegetables and grains, maybe even their chickens if a coop was left open or something, in order to throw a party every week -

- then a human would see all this nothing, and maybe history can absorb some humans dying of hunger because there's nothing in the forest or walking into faery circles about it, but the ecology can't absorb faeries collecting everything every year. If you pick all the flowers and berries they can't reseed the plants - planting them yourselves just opens a vulnerability. If you take all the honey the bees don't have any left and if you take the eggs then no new birds hatch and every year there are fewer and fewer bees and birds. Anything that eats those starves. And solving coordination problems about how to manage your environment is hard - maybe easier if you can't lie and everybody answers to a court leader so they can negotiate directly, but if there are forty billion of you? Eighty billion? A hundred and sixty billion? Three hundred and twenty - you presumably see where I'm going with this -"

" - yes. There's a thousand years before the history you remember and by long before then every bit of land that's worth having as territory will be."

"Exactly. So - either you're going to run into an extinction event and I can't save you without risking obliterating the universe, or you all manage, soon before it gets too much worse, to agree to stop having kids and rely mostly on me for food, or - you go somewhere."

" - is there somewhere to go?"

"I'm... not sure. We did cover the 'space' possibility before and it didn't look promising.

There might be enough time to figure out how to upload you. That's - not been invented yet in my future but it could possibly be figured out before you guys double again."

"I am not sure I know what the suggestion is concretely -"

"You've seen me use my computer some - it's theorized that by scanning a brain in enough detail, perhaps destructively, one could render all the information such as memories and personality as a program on a computer, which could if you did it right think like a live person of flesh and blood. We'd also have to solve the problem of getting an environment people wanted to live in rendered so the uploads can interact with it and stuff like that. I don't know if any of your magical properties would make the trip but the environment might be able to mimic some of them - running fast, being various sizes - whereas I have no good prospect of replacing debt tracking or its followon traits."

"It seems like we could at least use debt to check if it worked - we track debt between people, I'd expect regardless of whether they're on a computer - and if there's not debt among computer-people I guess that would be socially disruptive but not that much of a loss...

You won't get sufficiently high compliance, not voluntarily."

"Uh, if I upload somebody and the only indicator it didn't work is that they can no longer be in debt or vice versa, I'm not sure I'd consider that very damning evidence. It could be something that debt tracks that we shouldn't care about, in that case. But I don't have a strong prediction about it.

Are we talking 'I have to take over the world' here or something more along the lines of 'I'd better make the upload environment terrifically shiny and expect a steady trickle of uptake while the holdouts continue to live in regular courts but hopefully don't get to three hundred and twenty billion'?"

"- might depend on how nice you can make the environment, and on how convinced people are by conversations with acquaintances who went for it - it wouldn't be reversible, right -"

"...I don't think I'd say it would never be reversible. I can make bodies, and it might be doable to figure out how to get an upload stamped into the body's brain. It might never be fully reversible because I can't make bodies with magical properties, so if proper debt tracking goes, it might never come back except insofar as it applies to humans.

I'm... curious why now is the point at which there are twenty billion faeries. If faeries are inclined to double every twenty years, that suggests there were..." He does some math. "...about half a million three hundred years ago, and perhaps just a few hundred a couple centuries before that. Any small population like that ever having been stable would require there to be some condition keeping the doubling rate lower that then changed; if it was never stable, or crashy, and it's always been a doubling every twenty years situation, that suggests a breeding population of faeries popped into existence some six hundred sidereal years ago and I don't see how exactly that would have happened. I can try to forensic it but that will omit any necessary magical information..."

"I don't think we have records that old. ...fairies might not have always known how to slow down, and you can't have children without slowing down."

"I guess that could do it but it still leaves the bewildering question of why there are any faeries in the first place as opposed to not that."

"Well, why are there any humans as opposed to not that?"

"Humans evolved over many generations from other species and you can follow it back like that down to the precursors to single-celled organisms."

"Huh. Why are there any daeva as opposed to not that -"

"We think it started happening when the first valid circle was written but it's admittedly still very mysterious. But daeva don't have children and faeries do."

"We do! - I don't suppose you can solve this problem or at least buy yourself time on it by flying all over the world putting down the vegetation that you think ought to exist - it'd belong to you so no one'd eat it and it wouldn't matter if humans did -"

"...I don't think so. There's only one of me and I have never taken a course in naturalistic gardening. Also, if someone did eat it - it wouldn't take many, and why would they expect a blackberry bush that sprouted near their court to be mine? -"

"Well, if you toss it in fully-sized they ought to guess something's up. But people are stupid. 

Probably you could convince most courts, if your alternative was nice enough."

"It would take a lot more detail work to add a fully grown berry bush somewhere than to just drop seeds from the air.

I think if it can work at all it can be really nice."